hotshoe wrote:So your position on evidence is that if we DON'T have it, then that means we should assume the chances are 50/50 that it DID happen ? That the evidence we DON'T have, if we somehow did get it, would be evidence that Exodus occurred ?
My position is, let's examine all sides of any issue in ancient history before drawing sweeping, or misleading, conclusions.
hotshoe wrote:
In the absence of evidence showing that Hebrew slaves were at Pi-Ramesse and then "escaped" en masse, the only rational statement which can be made is "there is no evidence that the Exodus ever happened." That's it. That's not a sweeping statement. It's a simple statement of fact. There is no evidence that it ever happened.
It's a deceptive statement. It implies that we have 100% of the administrative papyri from the New Kingdom, and/or the stelae from this period is somehow complete, and those sources have all been deciphered and examined, and they provide no evidence of an exodus. This is not even close to being an accurate picture.
hotshoe wrote:
Did it ? Who knows ? What kind of evidence should we expect to find if it really had happened ? I don't expect even one single papyri to survive. It never occurred to me that they would. But I expect that the Hebrews, supposedly miraculously delivered by their god, and supposedly divinely inspired by their god in recording the history, would at least get the names correct. And those Hebrew texts did survive and we do have copies of them, with all their puzzling omissions and mysterious little errors.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Because the Hebrews described the exodus in mythological terms, and got some of the names wrong, the most rational conclusion to draw from that is there never was an exodus from Egypt at all?
hotshoe wrote:
I would be interested to know what Kitchen thinks is "correspondence with attested realities" and what his physical evidence is.
Read the book. It's long. I can't quote from the whole thing.